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Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism , ed. by John Greco (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2008).

The Pyrrhonian Problematic

Markus Lammenranta

Current discussion about skepticism focuses on Cartesian skepticism. There is an older and

perhaps more fundamental skeptical problematic documented in the works of Sextus Empiricus. It

is at least arguable that this is the problematic to which Descartes himself and other early modern

philosophers responded. However, it is not at all clear what this problematicthe Pyrrhonian

problematicreally is. I will give a rational reconstruction of it, considering three possible

interpretations of the problematic, and argue that only the last one provides a serious skeptical

challenge and explains the huge influence that the problematic had on early modern philosophy. 1

In contemporary analytical epistemology, skeptical problems are taken to be theoretical in nature.

They are composed of skeptical arguments for the impossibility of knowledge or justified belief.

Rather than making us accept the conclusion, these arguments are thought to teach us something

about knowledge or justified belief. They offer test cases for our theories of knowledge and

justification. Because the conclusion is intuitively implausible, our theories must explain what

goes wrong in the premises. Typically, the fault is seen to be in the epistemic premises. So our

theory must explain why these are false, and thus how knowledge or justified belief is, after all,

possible. 2

In this tradition, the Pyrrhonian problem is identified with a skeptical argument purporting to

show that it is impossible for finite beings like us to have any justified beliefs. Various theories of 1


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justification then try to explain what is wrong with this argument, and how finite beings can have

justified beliefs.

There is another common way of understanding the Pyrrhonian problematic. As scholars of

Hellenistic philosophy emphasize, ancient skeptics used to argue both for and against a

proposition. Because the arguments are of equal force, we are unable to decide whether the

proposition is true or false. Here the problem is seen to be practical or psychological rather than

theoretical. We are unable to decide between the alternatives because they are equally plausible. It

is the skeptics ability to find such equipollent oppositions that leads them to suspend all belief.

There is a third interpretation not as fully defended in the literature as the other two. According to

it, the problem is dialectical rather than theoretical or psychological: we seem to be unable to

resolve disagreements about the nature of reality without begging the question at issue. This

problem does not presuppose any theoretical assumptions about knowledge or justification, but

neither does it concern a purely psychological inability to decide between conflicting

propositions. It just assumes that in order to rationally resolve a disagreement, we should not beg

the question.

When Sextus wrote his texts, ancient skepticism already had a long history with a variety of

different positions. That is why it may be hard to find a coherent description of a single skeptical

problem there. Perhaps there are several such problems, so it may not be difficult to find some

textual evidence for each of these interpretations. However, rather than Sextuss own stance, I am

interested in the skeptical problems that an educated reader may find in his work and in evaluating

their epistemological significance. This may help us understand modern epistemology, which,

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ever since Descartes, has tried to respond to the problems found there. But even more important,

it may help us see a serious skeptical problem for which we may still lack a satisfactory solution.

I will start by considering the first two interpretations and argue that neither of them provides a

serious skeptical challenge to our beliefs: neither has a tendency to induce suspension of belief,

which the arguments of the ancient skeptics were supposed to do. Then I will try to explicate the

dialectical problem, which will prove to be much harder. Only this fully explains the skeptical

crisis created by the rediscovery of Sextuss books during the Renaissance and the responses of

early modern philosophers to it. I will try to show that not even contemporary analytical

epistemologists have sufficient resources for resolving it.

1. The Regress Problem

The core of the Pyrrhonian problematic is often taken to be an argument for the impossibility of

justified beliefs. This argument is found in the five modes of Agrippa and is called the regress

argument. It is an argument for a very strong form of global skepticism that denies the possibility

of any justified beliefs. Suspension of belief would then seem to be the appropriate attitude to

every proposition: if we are not justified in believing anything, we should not believe anything.

It was once common to interpret the Pyrrhonian skeptic as advocating this argument and basing

her suspension of belief on its negative epistemic conclusion. This raised the accusation of self-

refutation. If the conclusion of the argument is true, no one can be justified in believing anything,

not even the premises of the argument itself, and thus they cannot be used to justify the

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conclusion. No one can thus effectively argue for the conclusion that there cannot be justified

beliefs. So why should anybody take the argument seriously?

Many recent scholars of Hellenistic philosophy take this to be a misinterpretation of the

dialectical strategy of ancient skeptics. 3 The arguments of ancient skeptics are ad hominem

arguments. They are directed at us, the dogmatists, and use only premises that we accept. The

regress argument poses a problem for us because we are inclined to accept the premises and take

the argument to be valid, though we are not willing to accept the conclusion. As many

contemporary epistemologists see it, a genuine skeptical problem is a kind of paradox: we are

inclined to accept the premises and the denial of the conclusion, though they form an inconsistent

set of propositions. 4

On the other hand, Sextus says that the skeptics welcome the self-refuting nature of their

arguments. Their arguments are like a ladder that we throw away once we have climbed up it, or

like fire that after consuming the fuel also destroys itself. 5 However, as Hume noticed, our beliefs

tend to come back when we lose our reasons for giving them up. But then, the skeptic may point

out, we also return to the arguments that make us reject the beliefs once again. So the skeptical

arguments at least create instability in our beliefs. This may be enough to make them a serious

skeptical challenge to our beliefs. 6

In order to pose a genuine paradox, the regress argument must have plausible premises. As

Michael Williams points out, they should not be based on theoretical ideas that we are not bound

to accept. They should be based on our ordinary intuitions about justification and knowledge. 7

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Does the regress argument have such intuitively plausible premises? This is the standard

formulation of the argument:

1. In order to be justified in believing something, one must believe it on the basis of good

reasons.

2. Good reasons must themselves be justified beliefs.

3. Therefore, in order to be justified in believing something, one must believe it on the basis

of an infinite number of good reasons.

4. No human being can have an infinite number of good reasons.

5. Therefore, it is humanly impossible to have justified beliefs.

Most epistemologists have not found all the premises plausible. There are several ways of

criticizing the argument. Indeed, epistemologists use the argument typically just to classify the

possible theories of justification. These are distinguished by virtue of which premise or step in the

argument they deny: Circular (linear) coherentists deny the step from premises 1 and 2 to 3

because they think that a circular chain of reasons can justify a belief. Wittgensteinian

contextualists think that the chain of good reasons can terminate in beliefs that are not themselves

justified, and thus they deny premise 2. Foundationalists think that the chain terminates in basic

beliefs that are justified but do not derive all their justification from their inferential relations to

other justified beliefs. 8 They deny premise 1.

The skeptical conclusion is essentially based on the infinitist lemma (3) that only an infinite chain

of reasons can justify a belief. All other theories except dogmatic infinitism deny this. Though

Peter Klein, who has recently defended the position, argues that infinitism need not lead to

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skepticism, the skeptic has a strong position if infinitism is true. Indeed, Klein acknowledges that

skepticism is a serious possibility for the infinitist. 9

The regress argument thus provides a real paradox and a skeptical challenge only if infinitism is

an intuitively plausible account of justification. Initially, it does not seem to be plausible. Why

should we possess a concept of justification that is not applicable to any finite being? So the

skeptic must do something to convince us of the truth of infinitism.

In his reconstruction of skeptical reasoning, Michael Williams appeals to our practice of giving

and asking for reasons: Suppose I claim to know something. You can ask me how I know it. As a

reply, I give my reasons for believing what I claim to know. But then you can ask how I know my

reasons, and so on. Williamss skeptic admits that in real life this process of justification has an

end. It ends when my interlocutor is satisfied with my reasons. In spite of this, Williamss skeptic

insists that the regress goes on. Whether or not anybody really challenges my reasons, they can

reasonably be challenged, and so I must go on giving reasons. The skeptic concludes that I do not

know what I originally claimed unless I have first completed an infinite number of prior

justifications, which is, of course, impossible. 10 But is this really the intuitive conclusion to draw

from our practice of justifying knowledge claims?

Klein imagines a similar dialogue between Fred, the foundationalist, and Sally, the skeptic. Sally

asks Fred his reasons for believing that p. Fred gives as his reason his belief that q. Then Sally

asks his reasons for q, and the regress continues until Fred gives a reason that he takes to be a

basic belief, which, according to foundationalism, is justified independently of reasons. Now

Sally asks why Fred thinks that the basic belief is true. In order to avoid arbitrariness, Fred says

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that his basic belief has property P , and that all beliefs having P are likely to be true. But then

Sally insists that the regress does not stop, and asks Fred for his reasons for the metabeliefs that

his belief has P and that beliefs having P are probably true. Klein concludes that nobody is

completely justified in believing anything because this would require going through an infinite

number of reasons, but that people can still be provisionally justified in believing things because

such infinite chains are in a relevant sense available to them. 11

Neither infinitist conclusion from our ordinary practices is intuitive. We see this more clearly if

we think about the point of our practice of giving and asking for reasons. The point seems to be to

evaluate each other as potential informants. When you claim to know something, I ask your

reasons because I want to decide whether I can trust you and learn from you. In this sort of case, I

already have many beliefs about the world and your situation. I use these beliefs in evaluating

your trustworthiness, and I do not expect you to justify them. So the regress may very well

terminate in basic beliefs because these are the kind of beliefs I take to be probably true in your

circumstances. You need not justify them to me. This also explains why we sometimes attribute

knowledge to small children and nonhuman animals though they cannot justify their beliefs at all.

If we imagine that the practice of giving and asking for reasons is conducted between the skeptic

and us, the situation is different. The skeptic does not accept any beliefs as being justified or true.

There is no way to convince her because she does not accept any reasons that we could give, so

there is no way out of the regress. But why should this show that it is impossible for us to have

justified beliefs and knowledge? Our justificational practice does not aim at convincing the

skeptic. It aims at convincing someone who already has many beliefs and is able to use these

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beliefs for evaluating the given reasons. The fact that we cannot justify our beliefs to the skeptic is

of no epistemological importance.

So the skeptical strategy of arguing ad hominem from the infinite regress of reasons has no

chance of succeeding. Our ordinary epistemic concepts and practices cannot be used to support it.

It is thus hard to see how it could have created the skeptical crisis in early modern philosophy and

played such an important role in shaping modern epistemology. Neither does it explain how the

Pyrrhonian skeptics themselves became skeptics. Sextus does have a story about this, and this

story seems to give us an independent skeptical problem.

2. The Practical Problem

Sextus starts his Outlines of Scepticism by distinguishing three kinds of outcomes that any inquiry

may have: (1) it may result in discovery, (2) it may result in the denial of discovery and the

confession that the truth cannot be discovered, (3) or it may just continue. According to Sextus,

there are three kinds of philosophers corresponding to these outcomes: (1) the dogmatists think

that they have discovered the truth, (2) the Academics think that the truth cannot be discovered,

and (3) the skeptics continue inquiry. 12 If discovering the truth amounts to knowing the truth, we

can say that the dogmatists think that they know the truth, the Academics deny the possibility of

knowledge, and the skeptics suspend judgment both about their actually knowing anything and

about the possibility of knowledge.

Here Sextus wants to distinguish real skepticismPyrrhonismfrom Academic skepticism. The

latter is itself one sort of dogmatismnegative dogmatismbecause it defends the dogma that

nothing can be known. Presumably, this negative thesis is based on a positive epistemology:

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nothing can be known because the conditions of knowledge put forth by this epistemology cannot

be satisfied. So both dogmatists and Academics need an epistemology: the former need it for

defending their knowledge claims, and the latter for defending their claim about the impossibility

of knowledge.

Sextus ignores here the fact that the skeptics in Platos Academy typically argue ad hominem:

they use their opponents, the Stoics, epistemology to argue against it. Yet,the message is clear.

The Pyrrhonist neither needs nor possesses any epistemology. She suspends judgment about both

ahe nature and the possibility of knowledge. So her suspension of judgment is not based on any

theory or epistemological thesis, such as infinitism. It is based rather on her inability to resolve

disagreements among different dogmatists ncluding the disagreement about the possibility of

knowledge.

This is how Sextus describes the way one becomes a skeptic:

Sceptics began to do philosophy in order to decide among appearances and to apprehend

which are true and which false, so as to become tranquil; but they came upon equipollent

dispute, and being unable to decide this they suspended judgement. And when they

suspended judgement, tranquillity in matters of opinion followed fortuitously. 13

According to Sextus, the skeptics were originally inquirers who were seeking truth, but who

realized that there were disagreements about truth that they could not resolve. They were

therefore forced to suspend judgment. To their surprise, they achieved in this way the tranquility

to which they originally aspired by trying to find the truth.

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Sextus also describes skepticism as an ability:

an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way

at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and

accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement and afterwards to tranquillity. 14

So skepticism, as Sextus understands it, is not a thesis about the impossibility of knowledge or

justified belief. It is an ability to find equipollent oppositions and the practice of using this ability

to induce suspension of belief.

It is common to understand this account of skepticism in purely psychological terms. Thus from

Julia Annas and Jonathan Barness translation we get the following explanation of the relevant

terms:

By equipollence we mean equality with regard to being convincing or unconvincing.

Suspension of judgement is a standstill of the intellect, owing to which we neither reject

nor posit anything. Tranquillity is freedom from disturbance or calmness of soul. 15

This psychological interpretation is also defended in Michael Williamss article Skepticism

without Theory. He objects to the view that Pyrrhonian skepticism is based on any

epistemological thesis. Pyrrhonian skepticism arises from practice. It depends on acquiring an

ability, not on proving or even assenting to a thesis. Skepticism is an ability to oppose any thesis

or argument with a countervailing thesis or argument of equal force. Williams emphasizes that no

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epistemological commitments are buried in this notion of equal force, which is to be understood

as equal convincingness or plausibility. There is no implication of equal evidential force. 16

In spite of some textual support, this psychological interpretation makes the Pyrrhonian problem

completely trivial. Of course, if there is a question with conflicting answers that are equally

convincing, we suspend judgment about which answer is correct. For example, there seems to be

no convincing reason to believe that there is an even number of stars rather than an odd number of

stars. What else could we do but suspend belief about the matter? But in many cases, we do not

find the answers equally convincing. We are inclined to find one of the answers more plausible

than the others.

If the skeptic really finds such equally convincing oppositions everywhere, this requires that she

attend only to arguments that are equally strong on both sides of the issue, and manage to forget

arguments that do not balance in this way. But why should anybody try to do this? If we aim at

truth, we should rather take all arguments on both sides of the issue into account, and these

arguments typically do not balance. The only answer seems to be that the skeptic is convinced

that she can attain tranquility only by suspending belief, and that suspension of belief requires her

to do so. But such a skeptic hardly poses any problems for those who do not believe that this is

the way to attain tranquility, and who are still interested in truth.

3. The Ten Modes

In order to induce global suspension of judgment, the Pyrrhonists have general modesstrategies

or argumentsthat can be used in any topic. However, these modes do not save the psychological

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interpretation. A closer look at these modes, especially the ten modes of Aenesidemus and the

five modes of Agrippa, shows that they do not work if equipollent dispute is understood

psychologically. I will argue that they finally reveal a genuine and serious skeptical problematic

that cannot be as easily wiped out as the versions considered so far.

The ten modes of Aenesidemus share the following common structure:

1. x appears F relative to a.

2. x appears F * relative to b.

3. x cannot be both F and F * ( F and F * being incompatible properties).

4. We cannot decide whether x really is F or x really is F *.

5. We must suspend judgment about the real nature of x.

Sextus spends most of the time giving examples of 1 and 2, thus establishing that things appear

differently to different animals, to different people, in different sense organs, in different

perceptual circumstances, and so on. Then, in very much the same way, he proceeds to show that

we cannot decide between the conflicting appearances and concludes that we must suspend

judgment. 17

I have intentionally formulated the conclusion in an ambiguous way. Are we to understand the

word must in a psychological and causal way, or are we to understand it as a normative must

or should? Sextuss text seems to be ambiguous on this point.

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The psychological interpretation favors the former reading. It assumes that my considering the

conflicting appearances and being unable to favor one over the others causes me to suspend

judgment about the nature of reality. So the ten modes are not exactly arguments. Rather, they are

general strategies that are supposed to help find conflicting appearances or equipollent disputes

and to induce suspension of judgment causally.

If we look at the details, however, we see that the modes cannot work in this way. What is

supposed to cause suspension of judgment, according to this view, is the fact that I find the

alternatives that x is F and that x is F * equally convincing. The problem is that the conflicting

appearances that Sextus considers are not equally convincing in this way. The first mode appeals

to the fact that things appear differently to animals of different species. Of course, I am not aware

of how things appear to cows or dogs, for example, so I cannot compare my appearances with

their appearances and find both equally convincing. Surely I find my own appearances more

convincing than those I am not even aware of. After all, it is only those appearances that I am

aware of that causally affect my beliefs.

Sextus is also quite aware that the dogmatists do not find the appearances of other animals and

human beings as convincing as their own. He does not deny this psychological fact. His point is

rather that when they prefer their own appearances to those of other animals and human beings,

they make a mistake. There is something wrong with doing so:

For we shall not be able ourselves to decide between our own appearances and those of

other animals, being ourselves a part of the dispute and for that reason more in need of

someone to decide than ourselves able to judge. 18

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When the self-satisfied Dogmatists say that they themselves should be preferred to other

humans in judging things, we know that their claim is absurd. For they are themselves a

part of the dispute, and if it is by preferring themselves that they judge what is apparent,

then by entrusting the judging to themselves they are taking for granted the matter being

investigated before beginning the judging. 19

Here Sextus clearly thinks that the mistake of the dogmatists is a dialectical one. When dogmatists

judge that their own appearances are true while those of other animals and other people are false,

they simply assume what they are supposed to prove. They beg the question against their

opponents conflicting judgments. So our inability to decide between conflicting appearances is

not a psychological matter but an inability to do so without violating the rules of dialectic. It is an

inability to resolve disagreements without begging the question at issue.

This shows that the conclusions in the ten modes are, after all, normative. We should suspend

judgment because we cannot decide between conflicting appearances without begging the

question. The equipollence of oppositions is thus not a matter of equal convincingness. It is a

matter of neither participant in the dispute having dialectically effective reasons for her own

position. Neither can defend herself against the other without begging the question. Sextus

suggests that we should suspend judgment in this sort of situation.

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4. The Modes of Agrippa

The considerations that Sextus relies on in supporting (4) are systematized in the five modes of

Agrippa. We can see that the dialectical interpretation also fits very well with how they work.

According to Sextus, every object of investigation can be brought under the following five modes:

According to the mode deriving from dispute, we find that undecidable dissension about

the matter proposed has come about both in ordinary life and among philosophers.

Because of this we are not able either to choose or to rule out anything, and we end up

with suspension of judgement. In the mode deriving from infinite regress, we say that

what is brought forward as a source of conviction for the matter proposed itself needs

another such source, which itself needs another, and so on ad infinitum , so that we have no

point from which to begin to establish anything, and suspension of judgement follows. In

the mode deriving from relativity, as we said above, the existing object appears to be such-

and-such relative to the subject judging and to the things observed together with it, but we

suspend judgement on what it is like in its nature. We have the mode from hypothesis

when the Dogmatists, being thrown back ad infinitum , begin from something which they

do not establish but claim to assume simply and without proof in virtue of a concession.

The reciprocal mode occurs when what ought to be confirmatory of the object under

investigation needs to be made convincing by the object under investigation; then being

unable to take either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgement about both. 20

Sextus describes here five modes that are supposed to induce suspension of judgment about any

object of inquiry. We may call them the modes of (1) disagreement, (2) infinite regress, (3)

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relativity, (4) hypothesis, and (5) circularity. It is not clear how they are to be understood. Usually

they are thought to work together: the modes of disagreement and relativity challenge us to

justify our beliefs by revealing that there are competing claims about the matter, and then the rest

of the modes show that the process of justification cannot be completed in a satisfactory way. All

attempts to justify a belief lead either to an infinite regress, an arbitrary assumption, or circularity.

Often the challenging modes are seen to be unnecessary because the skeptic is thought to assume

implicitly that our concept of justification requires noncircular and nonarbitrary reasons. So the

three modes of infinite regress, hypothesis, and circularitythe so-called Agrippas trilemma

alone form the problem that can be identified with the regress argument against the possibility of

justified beliefs. 21

I have argued that this interpretation of Agrippas problem does not make it a serious skeptical

challenge to our beliefs. It also misses the dialectical nature of the problem. According to the

dialectical interpretation, it is the mode of disagreement that is the central one, and the others are

subordinate to it. Its structure is very much the same as in the ten modes, and we may regard it as

a generalization of them. Suppose we have a question to which there are just two possible

answers, p and ~ p. Then the mode of disagreement works as follows:

1. S 1 believes that p.

2. S 2 believes that ~ p.

3. At most one of them is right.

4. The disagreement between S 1 and S 2 is irresolvable.

5. We should suspend judgment about p.

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So the mode of disagreement alone is supposed to induce suspension of judgment. The other

modes are used if the dogmatist wants to deny 4, that the disagreement is irresolvable. He is then

asked how the disagreement is to be resolved. If he gives a reason r for his belief that p, it is

pointed out that there is also an irresolvable disagreement about r . If he admits this, he also admits

the irresolvability of the original disagreement. If he denies it, he is asked how the disagreement

about r is resolved, and so on. By repeating the mode of disagreement, the dogmatist is led into

Agrippas trilemma. Modes 2, 4, and 5 cannot resolve the disagreement: modes 4 and 5 are

clearly question begging, and nobody can complete an infinite chain of reason required by mode

2. 22

The dogmatist may also try to appeal to a criterion of truth, but he is told that there is an

irresolvable disagreement about it. If he tries to resolve this disagreement by appealing to a new

criterion of truth, he is led into a regress. If he appeals to the same criterion again, he is in a circle.

And if he just assumes a criterion, the mode of hypothesis applies to him.23

Sextus clearly assumes that in order to avoid skepticism, the dogmatist must be able to resolve all

disagreements there are or could be about the object of inquiry and the reasons he appeals to. This

requirement may seem too strong. We will see, however, that it arises from presuppositions that

are quite plausible.

5. The Dialectical Problem

The Pyrrhonian problematic is, after all, composed of an argument. We saw that suspension of

judgment cannot be based on equal convincingness of contradictory propositions. So it must be

based on an argument for the normative conclusion that we should suspend judgment. Notice that

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this conclusion is not based on epistemic premises and the lemma that justified belief is

impossible. It is based on our inability to resolve disagreements without begging the question and

the normative principle that we should suspend judgment in such conditions. So the argument

does not presuppose any epistemology, and therefore it cannot be opposed by rejecting that

epistemology.

How plausible is the normative principle? In order to answer this question, we must keep in mind

that the argument is meant to be an ad hominem argument, the targets of which are inquirers

seeking truth. As Sextus tells us, the skeptics were originally talented people who were seeking

truth and were puzzled about the disagreements they found. Disagreement would hardly be a

problem unless we were interested in truth. So we can assume that the target audience of the

argument is truth-seekers. And it includes the skeptics themselvesat least before they became

skeptics.

So how plausible is the requirement that inquirers should avoid begging the question under

inquiry? It is very plausible indeed. We can see this by considering two sorts of cases in which

disagreements arise. The principle says essentially that inquirers should treat them similarly, and

this accords very well with our intuitions about the cases:

1. The inquirer is an impartial observer who is attending to a dispute between two persons.

The dispute ends in a tie. Neither can convince the other because their arguments beg the

question. The inquirer does not have her own opinion about the matter under dispute and does

not have independent grounds regarding either side. So she has no choice but to suspend

judgment about the matter.

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2. The situation is similar, except now the inquirer is herself one participant in the dispute.

Being a participant, she naturally has her own beliefs about the matter. Otherwise, there would

be no dispute. Once again, she realizes that the dispute ends in a tie. Neither position can be

defended without begging the question. What should she do in this situation? It seems that she

should give up her beliefs about the matter under dispute.

It is clear that the inquirer should suspend judgment in the first case: she has no ground for

choosing one rather than the other of the opposed views. But why should the outcome be different

in the second case? The only relevant difference is that the inquirer is in this case a participant in

the dispute. If she were to prefer her own view in this case, she would seem to choose it simply

because it is her own. But how could she then hope to find the truth? It is quite accidental which

party in the dispute she happens to be. 24

The two cases are thus in all normatively relevant respects similar. It does not make a normative

difference that the inquirer is herself a participant in the dispute. If she should suspend judgment

in one case, she should do the same in the other. The implicit normative assumption is that it is

wrong to beg the question, so one should not prefer ones own position simply on the ground that

it is ones own. One should look for impartial grounds for ones beliefs. This, at least, is what the

skeptics dialectical norm suggests, and it does have considerable intuitive force.

In brief, the problem is that there are equally good arguments for both sides of the dispute. They

may not be equally good from the perspectives of the participants, who both take the argument of

the other party to be unsound. But they are equally good from the point of view of the impartial

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observer, who sees how both arguments beg the question against each other. For her, the choice

between the two sides would be completely arbitrary. The intuition is that the sincere truth-seeker

should view the dispute from this impartial point of view and suspend judgment.

6. Appearance and Reality

The dialectical argument also relies on a general distinction between appearance and reality. In

early modern philosophy, the distinction is typically made ontologically, between mental objects

ideas or sense dataand physical objects in the external world. But this is not the distinction

that is present in the ancient skeptical problematic. The ancient distinction does not concern just

sensory appearances and external objects. It is a topic-neutral distinction that applies to any object

of inquiry. About any topic we can ask what appears to be the case and what is in fact the case.

For example, an argument may appear valid but not in fact be valid. 25

I suggest that the distinction is to be understood as a distinction between how things are

represented and how they are in themselves. In this way, we get the general distinction that covers

both sensory experiences and beliefs. Both represent the world, and the world may differ from the

way it is represented. What makes the modes of Aenesidemus and Agrippa such a serious

problem is that they apply to both our sensory and our doxastic appearances. We cannot decide

which of our appearances are true by appealing to other appearancesbe they sensory or doxastic

because the same problem of variability of appearances concerns these appearances.

Though the received view among analytical epistemologists is that skeptical problems depend on

dubious epistemological presuppositions, it is also common to think that skepticism presupposes

realism. This seems to be true of the Pyrrhonian problem as it is understood here. The distinction

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between appearance and reality is realistic. It presupposes two moderate forms of realism. As

William Alston points out, we must distinguish between alethic realism and metaphysical realism.

Alethic realism is a thesis about truth. It says that a belief or a perceptual content is true if and

only if the world is the way it is represented by it. Metaphysical realism is the thesis that the

world is mind independent, that is, independent of the way it is represented. 26

In short, alethic realism says that appearances represent reality, and metaphysical realism says

that reality is independent of its appearances. Both theses are mere platitudes and were taken to be

such during the greater part of the history of Western philosophy. But once we accept both theses,

we have a problem: if our only access to reality is through its appearances, and these vary in the

way suggested, how can we ever decide which of the appearances are true and which are false?

Of course, if we were allowed to beg the question in favor of some of them, the matter would be

easy. But then anybody could defend the truth of any appearance in the same way. The task is to

distinguish true appearances from false ones without begging the question, and this seems to be

impossible.

If the dialectical interpretation is correct, we have three main options to avoid the skeptical

conclusion. (1) We may try to produce non-question-begging reasons for our beliefs and show

how disagreements could thus be resolved. (2) We may reject the dialectical principle. (3) Or we

may reject either of the realistic theses. Cartesian foundationalism seems to be motivated by the

first option. Contemporary internalist and externalist epistemologists typically choose the second

one. They take epistemology to be independent of dialectical issues. Relativists take dialectic

more seriously. They think that we can avoid skepticism only by rejecting realism. We will see

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that none of these options should satisfy us. This makes the dialectical problem a more difficult

and serious skeptical problem than those given by the other interpretations.

7. Cartesian Foundationalism

I have formulated the Pyrrhonian problematic without presupposing any epistemological theories

or at least any theories of knowledge or justified belief. This is not to say that such theories

could not be offered as a response to the problematic. On the contrary, traditional theories of

knowledge and justification seem to be motivated by the attempt to respond to it.

This is how the problematic is connected to knowledge and justification. We just take knowledge

to be the state that truth-seeking inquirers want to attain. This is a natural and traditional use of

the term. We want to discover the truth, that is, to know the truth. When we now face the

Pyrrhonian problematic, the natural intuition is that we cannot know until we can give non-

question-begging justification for the truth of our belief. This seems to motivate, for example,

Descartes, who writes in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind :

Whenever two persons make opposite judgments about the same thing, it is certain that at

least one of them is mistaken, and neither, it seems, has knowledge. For if the reasoning of

one of them were certain and evident, he would be able to lay it before the other in such a

way as eventually to convince his intellect as well. 27

So we want to have knowledge, and we believe that we cannot have it if we do not have non-

question-begging reasons for the truth of our beliefs. What kind of reasons are these? In the same

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work, Descartes says that intuition and deduction are the only sources of knowledge. In his later

works, he speaks about clear and distinct perception.

What Descartes and other Cartesian foundationalists have in mind is some sort of direct intuitive

awareness of certain facts or truths. It seems that without a faculty like this, we cannot have the

required reasons. We cannot resolve disagreements by appealing to further beliefs that are

themselves under dispute. We must get outside our beliefs directly to the facts that make them

true. We can thus ensure the truth of some of our beliefs by direct awareness of their truth-

makers. Other beliefs are then inferred from this foundation by deduction or, as empiricists allow,

by deduction or induction. Also, the conclusions of these inferential steps must be ensured to be

true or highly probable by our intuitive grasp of the inferential relations.

It may seem that this sort of Cartesian foundationalism would be the only fully satisfactory

response to the problematic. The required direct awareness of certain facts or truth-makers of our

beliefs and necessary inferential relations between beliefs would provide an impartial standpoint

from which to judge which beliefs are true without just begging the question. Furthermore, it was

supposed that this direct awareness removes all doubt about the existence of those facts and

guarantees the truth or probable truth of the beliefs based on it. So anybody who is aware of the

relevant facts would have to follow the reasoning and become convinced of the conclusion.

Disagreements could therefore be resolved by a careful use of our faculty of intuitive reason.

What directly accessible truths are there? In order to answer this question, Descartes uses the

method of doubt. If we could find some completely indubitable propositions, these would be the

ones that we can just see to be true. Others, like Berkeley and Russell, use also Sextuss strategy

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in the ten modes. Their conclusion from the variability of sensory appearances is not that we

should suspend judgment. They conclude that in perception we are not aware of physical object at

all but only of our own ideas or sense data. 28

The upshot of both strategies is that there are at most two subjects that we can be directly aware

of: the present contents of our own mind and obvious necessary truths, including truths about

necessary inferential relations between propositions. This creates the notorious problem of our

knowledge about the external world. The relation of our mind to the external world seems to be

contingent rather than necessary. So there is no intuitively accessible inferential relation from the

mind to the external world. Cartesian foundationalism leads to Cartesian skepticism.

There is a more fundamental worry, and Wilfrid Sellars presents it as a dilemma: either the kind

of direct awareness in question is propositional in content, in which case it itself needs

justification, or it is nonpropositional, in which case it is unable to provide justification. In neither

case can it be used to stop the regress of reasons in a non-question-begging way. 29 There are other

worries, but together these two problems form a strong case against Cartesian foundationalism. 30

I have presented Cartesian foundationalism as a possible response to the Pyrrhonian problematic.

Post-Cartesian epistemological theories can be seen as reactions to the failure of the Cartesian

program rather than as attempts to resolve the original Pyrrhonian problematic. Theories in the

analytical tradition appeal to our ordinary epistemic concepts and practices and argue that

Cartesian epistemology has got them wrong. They suggest standards of knowledge and

justification that are less stringent and psychologically more realistic but at the same time not

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strong enough to settle our disputes. This reaction may help us avoid Cartesian skepticism, but, I

will argue, it does not give a satisfactory response to the original Pyrrhonian problematic.

8. Internalism

There are two ways of weakening the Cartesian requirements. The first of these keeps the

requirements that the reasons or the factors that make our beliefs justified are something we can

be directly aware of by introspection or reflection. They are factors that we must be able to appeal

to in justifying our beliefs. What this suggestion rejects is the requirement that justification be

truth conducive. After all, this is not something we can be directly aware of. There is also an

intuition that supports this weakening:

Imagine that you are deceived by a Cartesian demon that arranges things so that all your

experiences, beliefs and other mental states are the same as they are now but the external

world is completely different from what you believe. When you now form a perceptual

belief based on sense experience and you have no reason to doubt the belief, the intuition

is that your belief is justified. The facts that your belief is false and that your experience is

not a reliable indication of truth do not affect your being justified in your belief. So

external factors, such as truth and reliability, do not affect your being justified in your

beliefs. 31

Let us grant that there is such an internal sense of justification. Justification is a function of

factors that are internal to the believing subject. External factors, like truth and reliability, do not

affect justification. We may assume simply that these internally accessible factors are the

subjects nonfactive mental states. 32 Internalism then makes justification the function of the

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subject's beliefs and experiences. Externalism takes justification to depend also on factors external

to the mind.

What does internalism say about irresolvable disagreements? If we assume that both participants

are reflective and careful in attending to their own internal evidence, it seems that they can both

be justified in their beliefs, though at most one of them is right. For example, a theist may very

well be internally justified in believing that God exists, while an atheist may be equally internally

justified in believing that God does not exist. Though neither of them can rationally convince the

other, both can still be justified in their beliefs. So contemporary internalism, unlike Cartesian

foundationalism, does not require non-question-begging reasons for justified belief. We can

justifiably persist in our beliefs irrespective of irresolvable disagreements with others.

Internalism does allow that the evidence that both the theist and the atheist have about their

opponents beliefs and reasons may undermine or defeat their own justification, in which case

they are not justified in their beliefs. If this were the case, they should both give up their beliefs,

and the skeptic would win. 33 However, assuming that both are sophisticated enough, they may

also have as part of their evidence a theory that explains why the other party is wrong and why its

evidence is misleading. In this case, they both can sustain their justification for their beliefs. But

would not the skeptic win in this case too? If the conflicting beliefs of the theist and the atheist

really are equally justified, it is arbitrary to favor one over the other. They should rather both give

up their beliefs.

An internalist may point out that this is not the way things appear from the participants subjective

point of view, and it is this that determines internal justification. It may be that from each

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participants point of view, the other participant is not justified in his or her belief. They may both

be justified in believing that the other party has made a mistake, has a blind spot, or has in some

other way evaluated the evidence incorrectly. 34 So both participants in a dispute not only may

have justified beliefs but also may be justified in believing that the other participants belief is not

justified. In this case, neither of them has any reason for suspending belief.

Though the participants in a dispute could not recognize the equal justification of their conflicting

beliefs, an impartial observer who is aware of the relevant internal facts could surely do that.

From her point of view, their beliefs are epistemically on a par, and it would be impossible for her

to say who is right and who is wrong. So at least she would have to suspend judgment, having no

independent reasons for either side. The skeptics point is that it is this impartial point of view that

a sincere inquirer or truth-seeker should take.

An internalist may insist that we should stick to our own subjective point of view and decide what

to believe from that. 35 But can I really stick to my subjective point of view once I have realized

that from the objective and impartial point of view, my opponent and I are equally justified in our

beliefs? I have realized that things appear differently from different points of view, and that there

is no impartial way of choosing between them. Can I now go back to my own subjective point of

view and be happy with how things appear from that point of view? Surely, I cannot if I am

seriously interested in truth. As a truth-seeker, I should rather conclude that internal justification

is not what I want.

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9. Externalism

The second way of weakening the Cartesian program retains the truth-conducivity of justification

but rejects the awareness requirement. It is enough for justification that the sources of belief are

reliable. The subject need not know or be aware of what those sources are and whether they are

reliable. According to a typical form of externalism, reliabilism, justification is a function of the

reliable causal origin of belief. So justification and knowledge do not require non-question-

begging reasons. Indeed, they do not require reasons at all. They require that the belief be caused

in a reliable way.

Reliabilism would be an easy answer to the first version of the Pyrrhonian problematic. The

regress of reasons terminates in beliefs that have some other reliable source than reasoning. Of

course, it is possible for finite beings to have such beliefs. So reliabilism easily explains how it is

possible for us to have justified beliefs. But what is in question in the dialectical version is not

merely the possibility of justified belief and knowledge. The problem is to decide who in fact

knows or is justified in his or her beliefs. So even if we were to grant that reliabilism is the right

answer to the possibility question, we do not yet have an answer to the actuality question.

Let us assume that we want to have knowledge, and that we understand knowledge as a true belief

that has a reliable source. According to Sextus, our situation is similar to that of the people in the

following simile:

Let us imagine that some people are looking for gold in a dark room full of treasures. It

will happen that each will grasp one of the things lying in the room and think that he has

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got hold of the gold. But none of them will be persuaded that he has hit upon the gold even

if he has in fact hit upon it. In the same way, the crowd of philosophers has come into the

world, as in a vast house, in search of truth. But it is reasonable that the man who grasps

the truth should doubt whether he has been successful. 36

Let us assume that those people in the dark room who have hit upon the gold have not done so

accidentally. They happen to have some reliable way of detecting pieces of gold. They thus

resemble inquirers or truth-seekers who have arrived at a true belief in a reliable way. So,

according to Sextus, even people who have in fact hit upon the gold or come to know the truth

in the reliabilist senseshould doubt whether they have done so.

Why should inquirers doubt their knowledge? They should do so because none of them has any

non-question-begging way of deciding which of them really know and which of them do not.

None of them is able to produce a non-question-begging argument for the truth of his or her own

beliefs or the reliability of his or her own sources of belief. Because there are disagreements both

about the truth of beliefs and the reliability of the sources of belief, they cannot argue from the

truth of some particular beliefs to the reliability of their sources or the other way around without

begging the question. There is no impartial way of saying who is right and who is wrong. So

everybody is left in the dark about his or her really knowing anything.

Reliabilists typically point out that there is nothing in reliabilism that prevents one from attaining

knowledge about reliability and thus knowing that one knows. If our sources of belief really are

reliable, we can use these sources to attain knowledge about their own reliability. Though this is

surely possible if reliabilism is true, it does not help with the present problem, which concerns the

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actuality of knowledge rather than its possibility. Arguing for the reliability of a source from

premises based on the very same source begs the question at issue: because the premises are based

on the source in question, we cannot be justified in accepting them unless the source really is

reliable. When we thus use the argument to justify the conclusion, we assume implicitly that the

conclusion is true. This begs the question concerning the reliability of the source. 37

A reliabilist might think that some questions simply need to be begged, and that the reliability of

ones sources of belief is such a question. But if it were permissible to beg this question, then it

would be very easy to defend almost any source of belief. Religious people could defend the

reliability of religious experience by arguing from premises based on religious experience.

Crystal-ball gazers could defend the reliability of the crystal ball by arguing from premises based

on the crystal ball. Any intelligent madman could offer his favorite source and defend its

reliability in the same way. Indeed, people would not even need to do this. They could simply

assert without argument that the source in question is reliable.

If he is really aiming at truth, the reliabilist should not be willing to beg the question concerning

reliability. He should suspend judgment about the scope of his knowledge and the reliability of his

sources of belief. He, like anybody else, is in the dark and has no impartial grounds for preferring

some particular set of sources to others.

10. Relativism and Antirealism

It seems that there is no satisfactory epistemological resolution of the Pyrrhonian problematic.

Perhaps we should rather focus on its realistic presuppositions. A radical Protagorean relativist

avoids the problem by denying that there are genuine disagreements about reality. If I believe that

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p and you believe that p, we are both right because p is true for me and p is true for you. There

is no disagreement between us. Indeed, there can be no disagreements because every belief or

appearance is true. If truth is relative in this way, everybody can retain his or her beliefs without

begging the question against others.

The traditional objection is that relativism is self-referentially incoherent: when the relativist says

that relativism is true, she may mean that relativism is absolutely true or that relativism is

relatively true. In the former case, she contradicts her own view that truth is relative. In the latter

case, she acknowledges that relativism is true only for the relativist. It is not true for the

absolutist. This is dialectically inefficient. She cannot argue the absolutist out of his position.

If we take relativism to be a response to the Pyrrhonian problem, the objection is misdirected. The

problem is composed of an ad hominem argument against the absolutist. Because the absolutist

accepts the premises of this argument, he cannot avoid the conclusion that he should suspend

belief. If, in spite of this, he continues to hold to his beliefs, it is his position that is incoherent.

The relativist avoids the skeptical conclusion and the possible incoherence that it produces by

denying the premise that there are genuine disagreements. There is no reason for her to suspend

belief. 38

However, because it denies the possibility of error and disagreement, Protagorean relativism is

extremely implausible. A more plausible form of alethic relativismrelativism about truth

relativizes truth to something other than singular persons, such as social groups or cultures. If

truth is relative to something that can be shared by different persons, error and disagreement are

possible for them. This shared background also provides the neutral basis for resolving their

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disagreements. When the background is not shared, there can be no genuine disagreements. So

alethic relativism gives some hope for resolving the Pyrrhonian problematic.

Alethic relativism denies alethic realism that many philosophers take to be a mere truism.

According to alethic realism, it is an obvious necessary truth that a proposition that p is true if and

only if p. It follows from this that one and the same proposition cannot be true for some people

and false for others. So the truth-value of a proposition cannot vary in the way that alethic

relativism suggests. For these philosophers, this is a sufficient reason for rejecting alethic

relativism. 39

Another form of relativism denies metaphysical realism rather than alethic realism. Instead of

truth, it relativizes facts or reality. According to metaphysical relativism, there are no facts

simpliciter or absolute facts. There are facts only relative to conceptual scheme, culture or some

other parameter. So beliefs that appear to ascribe incompatible properties to the same object may

all be made true by different relative facts. Metaphysical relativism explains how people who

appear to disagree about the same absolute fact can all be right by interpreting their beliefs as

being about different relative facts.

Though alethic relativism and metaphysical relativism promise to resolve the Pyrrhonian

problematic, both are problematic if they are taken to be global in scope. The problem of global

relativism is not its self-referential incoherence or dialectical indefensibility but vicious regress.

In the case of metaphysical relativism, we get the regress as follows. Assuming that a is an object,

F is a property and P 1,, P is a sequence of parameters, metaphysical relativism says that there

are no facts of the form:

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1. a is F .

There are only facts of the form:

2. a is F relative to P 1.

We can now ask whether this relational fact is itself an absolute fact or a relative fact. If it is an

absolute fact, global metaphysical relativism is false. But if it is a relative fact, we get a more

complex relational fact:

3. The fact that a is F relative to P 1 is relative to P 2.

If this is also a relative fact, there must be a more complex relational fact, and so on ad infinitum.

Global metaphysical relativism entails thus the absurd view that all facts are infinitely long. 40 And

global alethic relativism creates a similar regress. 41

We can avoid the problem by restricting the scope of relativism to some particular subject matter,

such as aesthetic, moral or epistemic truths or facts. For example, epistemic relativism says that

there are no absolute epistemic facts. There are no epistemic facts of the form: S is justified in

believing that p. There are only facts of the form: S is justified in believing that p relative to the

system of epistemic rules that the ascriber A accepts. This relational fact is not really an epistemic

fact. It is a mental fact about S s and As beliefs. And because this is an absolute fact, there is no

regress. So epistemic relativism avoids the regress by interpreting epistemic judgment as being

made true by absolute nonepistemic facts.

There is a current debate about the coherence of even this sort of local relativism. Paul

Boghossian argues that it cannot be coherently formulated, but there are others who disagree. 42

We cannot and need not resolve this disagreement here. It is enough to note that these forms of

local relativism can at most resolve disagreements about those subject matters that they are

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restricted to. As we have seen, the Pyrrhonian problem is general: it concerns any object of

inquiry. So the local forms of relativism cannot resolve it.

It may be objected that there is a sense in which epistemic relativism is quite general: about any

disagreement, we can ask what the participants are justified in believing. Epistemic relativism

allows that each participant can be justified in his or her belief even if he or she cannot rationally

convince the other participants. Each can be justified relative to different epistemic rules. So

epistemic relativism explains how people can justifiably or rationally disagree and persist in their

beliefs even though they cannot rationally resolve their disagreements. Does this not resolve the

Pyrrhonian problematic?

We saw earlier that the Pyrrhonian problematic presupposes that we take an impartial point of

view to our disagreements. The problem is that, from this point of view, we cannot rationally

decide who is right and who is wrong and are forced to suspend belief. The relativist comes to our

rescue by pointing out that the disputing parties can all be right relative to different parameters.

So the problem of deciding between them disappears. However, the epistemic relativist cannot

say this. She can say at most that when the participants take themselves to be justified in their

beliefs, they are right relative to their respective epistemic rules. This does not help us, the

impartial observers, to say who is right in the original disagreement about the absolute facts

because, according to epistemic relativism, there are no facts by virtue of which one system of

epistemic rules is more correct than the others.

Relativism is thus unable to resolve the Pyrrhonian problematic. Global relativism has absurd

consequences, and local forms of relativismassuming that they can even be coherently

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formulatedcan at most handle some disagreements. Disagreements about most matters we care

about are left unresolved.

11. The Skeptical Moral

I have discussed three interpretations of the ancient Pyrrhonian problematic and have argued that

only the last one, the dialectical interpretation, provides a serious skeptical challenge to our

beliefs. There seems to be no satisfactory nonskeptical response to it. Should we thus accept the

skeptical conclusion and stop believing anything? This is what the Pyrrhonists are traditionally

thought to suggest. The traditional objection, made by Hume, is that it is impossible to live

without beliefs. On the one hand, action requires beliefs: without beliefs, we would be like

vegetables that need someone else to take care of their needs. On the other hand, we cannot just

give up our beliefs. This is psychologically impossible. Belief is simply not under our voluntary

control. 43

Hume seems to be right. We cannot live without beliefs. But this does not get us off the hook.

Remember that the skeptic gives us an ad hominem argument. It is we who are committed to the

conclusion, and it is our problem if we cannot follow its recommendation. Nevertheless, Sextus

thinks that it is possible to be a skeptic. The skeptic lives by appearances, he says. So we still need

to consider whether there could be a plausible skeptical resolution of the problematic.

The received view is that the Pyrrhonian skeptic really intends to live without beliefs by relying

on appearances understood in some nondoxastic way. Whether there is such a sense of

appearance and whether it helps us respond to Humes challenge is controversial. 44 We need

not, however, go into this debate because the dialectical interpretation of the problematic does not

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support this view of skepticism. It is rather the epistemological and psychological interpretations

that do so, but these do not make it a serious challenge to our beliefs.

The moral of the first, theoretical, interpretation is clear. If there can be no justified beliefs, the

suspension of belief should be global. But this demand only concerns the infinitist. If we are not

infinitists, there is no moral for us. We can keep all our beliefs. The same is true of the skeptics

who do not accept the infinitist dogma.

Also, the psychological interpretation suggests that the skeptic lives without beliefs. If the reasons

for and against a proposition are equally strong psychologically, then we are forced to suspend

belief in it. The objection was that it is extremely difficult to maintain such a balance in most

cases. Furthermore, the attempt to do so seems to be unmotivated. In any case, the scope of

skepticism would in fact be very restricted under this interpretation. Surely, at least our

commonsense beliefs are safe from doubt in this psychological sense.

According to the dialectical interpretation, the proper scope of Pyrrhonian skepticism is things we

have disagreements about. Since we do not disagree about appearances, they fall outside this

scope. So the skeptic may very well retain her beliefs about the world insofar as she does not take

those beliefs to be true. This is something that is disputed, not the fact that she has beliefs or that

things appear to her in some way.

So one possible skeptical moral deriving from the dialectical interpretation is that we should

suspend judgment about the truth of our beliefs. The scope of suspension of judgment is restricted

to the higher level propositions about the truth of lower level propositions. When the skeptic thus

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asserts something, she just expresses the proposition that she believes something. She does not

suggest that the belief is true or that she knows anything. Because she does not want to beg any

questions, her utterances can be understood as including an implicit indexical element, It appears

to me that, and expressing her current belief about the matter. In this way, she avoids

contradicting others who may have conflicting beliefs about the same matter.

There is tension or instability in this sort of skepticism. Because of the obvious necessary truth it

is true that p if and only if p, it may be hard to believe that p without also believing that it is true

that p, provided that it is even logically possible. Some commentators suggest that instead of

restricting the scope of doubt, the skeptic distinguishes between two kinds of assent or

propositional attitudes. 45 Let us call them belief and acceptance. Belief is a passive state produced

in us by various causal processes and is not under our direct voluntary control. Acceptance is a

voluntary act of judging something to be true, and it needs to be based on reasons. When the

skeptic thus suspends judgment, she refrains from accepting anything as true. At the same time,

she goes on forming beliefs involuntarily. Yet this may not avoid all instability: The skeptic

believes involuntarily that p and that it is true that p, but she also believes involuntarily that there

are others who disagree with her and that she has no impartial reasons for accepting her own

belief that p to be true. Why should these latter beliefs have no causal effect on the former

beliefs?

So there seems to be no satisfactory response to the dialectical version of the Pyrrhonian

problematic. Perhaps this is just an initial appearance, and we can work out such a response. It is

more probable, however, that philosophers will continue debating the matter without reaching a

consensus. 46

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Notes

1. See Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1979); Charles Schmitt, The Rediscovery of Ancient Skepticism in ModernTimes, in The Skeptical Tradition , ed. M. F. Burnyeat (Berkeley: University of California Press,1983).

2. See, for example, John Greco, Putting Skeptics in Their Place (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000).

3. See, for example, Michael Frede, The Sceptics Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of thePossibility of Knowledge, in The Original Sceptics: A Controversy , ed. M. Burnyeat and M.Frede (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 127131; Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of

Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45.

4. See, for example, Stewart Cohen, How to Be a Fallibilist, Philosophical Perspectives 2(1988): 9394.

5. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians , trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1935), 487489 (M VIII, 480481).

6. Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 66.

7. Michael Williams, Skepticism, in The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology , ed. J. Greco and E.Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 3536.

8. Because holistic coherentism rejects the idea that justification depends on a linear chain of reasons, we may classify it as a special case of foundationalism that takes all justified beliefs to be

basic beliefs.

9. Peter Klein, Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of Reasons, Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 297 325.

10. Williams, Skepticism, 39.

11. Peter Klein, The Failures of Dogmatism and a New Pyrrhonism, Acta Analytica 15 (2000):1417; Klein, Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of Reasons, 312316.

12. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism , ed. J. Annas and J. Barnes (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), 3 (PH I, 14).

13. Ibid., 10 (I, 26).

14. Ibid., 4 (I, 8).

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15. Ibid., 5 (I, 10).

16. Michael Williams, Skepticism without Theory, Review of Metaphysics 41 (1988): 554555.

17. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism , 1140 (PH I, 35163). For commentary, see Annasand Barnes, Modes of Scepticism ; R. J. Hankinson, The Sceptics (London: Routledge, 1995),chap. 9.

18. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism , 17 (I, 59).

19. Ibid., 25 (I, 90).

20. Ibid., 4041 (I, 165169).

21. This is the standard way of understanding the modes of Agrippa among analytical

epistemologists. See, for example, Robert Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pt. 2; Greco, Putting Skeptics in Their Place , chap. 5; Ernest Sosa, How to Resolve the Pyrrhonian Problematic: A Lesson fromDescartes, Philosophical Studies 85 (1997): 229249; Williams, Skepticism; Williams,

Problems of Knowledge , chap. 5.

22. One mystery of Agrippas problem is the mode of relativity. It also appears as one of the tenmodes, and Sextus says that it is the most general of them. One possibility is that it just spells outthe conclusion of the mode of disagreement: We can say how things appear to the participants inthe dispute, but we cannot say how they are in themselves. The object of dispute is not how thingsappear. It is how they are in their real nature. The other interpretation is that Sextus confuses

skepticism and relativism. Richard Bett argues that Aenesidemus was really a relativist. If Sextustook Aenesidemus to be a skeptic, the relativistic phrases may have been left in the text bymistake. See Bett, What Does Pyrrhonism Have to Do with Pyrrho? in Ancient Scepticism and the Sceptical Tradition , ed. J. Sihvola (Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica, 2000). In any case,relativism is a possible response to Agrippas problem. It denies 3. See section 10.

23. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism , 72 (II, 20).

24. Gary Gutting argues in a similar way in his Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (NotreDame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 83 87. However, he thinks that we get theskeptical conclusion only if the disputing parties are epistemic peersthat is, equals inintelligence, perspicacity, honesty, thoroughness, and other relevant epistemic virtues. ThomasKelly argues that we should further restrict the set of peers: only people sharing the sameevidence count. See his Epistemic Significance of Disagreement, Oxford Studies in

Epistemology 1 (2005): 173 175. The skeptic seems to be more liberal. She counts even animalsof nonhuman species as our peers. Though animals cannot defend themselves by arguments, weunderstand that the truth of their appearances can be defended as effectively as our own humanappearances. So what is crucial is not equal epistemic virtue or evidence but the fact that bothsides can be equally well defendedthat they are dialectically on a par.

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25. Myles Burnyeat, Can the Sceptic Live His Skepticism? in Burnyeat and Frede, TheOriginal Sceptics , 3741; Benson Mates, The Skeptical Way: Sextus Empiricuss Outlines of

Pyrrhonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.

26. William Alston, A Realistic Conception of Truth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1996).

27. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes , vol. 1, ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D.Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 11.

28. Kenneth Winkler, Berkeley, Pyrrhonism, and the Theaetetus , in Pyrrhonian Skepticism , ed.W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4854; Bertrand Russell, The

Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), chap. 1.

29. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, in Science, Perception and Reality

(London: Routledge, 1963), 128129. For a more accessible formulation, see Laurence BonJour,The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 69.

30. There have been attempts to rehabilitate Cartesian foundationalism, especially by LaurenceBonJour and Richard Fumerton. See M. DePaul, ed., Resurrecting Old-Fashioned

Foundationalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

31. See Keith Lehrer and Stewart Cohen, Justification, Truth, and Coherence, Synthese 55(1983): 191192; Richard Foley, Whats Wrong with Reliabilism? Monist 68 (1985): 192193.

32. Perceiving that is a factive propositional attitude because perceiving that p entails that p.

Nonfactive mental states do not entail the truth of their content and thus anything about theexternal world.

33. Richard Feldman draws this conclusion from disagreements between epistemic peers whohave shared their evidence. See his Epistemological Puzzles about Disagreement, in

Epistemology Futures , ed. S. Hetherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 216 236.

34. See Alvin Plantinga, Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism, in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Exclusivism , ed. P. L. Quinn and K. Meeker (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000), 184.

35. See Kelly, Epistemic Significance of Disagreement, 179, and Richard Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79.

36. Sextus Empiricus: Against the Logicians , 27 (M VII, 52). The translation is from JonathanBarnes, Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 138 139.

37. William Alston calls arguments of this sort epistemically circular in The Reliability of Sense Perception (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 15 17. For a more detailed discussionof the reliabilist responses, see Markus Lammenranta, Reliabilism, Circularity, and thePyrrhonian Problematic, Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003): 315332.

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38. Because the relativist therefore has no need to defend relativism for the absolutist, she mayvery well concede that relativism is only relatively true.

39. Alston, Realistic Conception of Truth , 180.

40. See Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2006), 54 57.

41. See Frederick F. Schmitt, Truth: A Primer (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 68 71.

42. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge , chap. 6. The coherence of epistemic relativism is defended by Ram Neta in In Defense of Epistemic Relativism, Episteme 4 (2007): 30 48; and by GideonRosen in The Case against Epistemic Relativism: Reflections on Chapter 6 of Fear of

Knowledge , Episteme 4 (2007): 10 29. See also Boghossians response in The Case againstEpistemic Relativism: Replies to Rosen and Neta, Episteme 4 (2007): 49 65.

43. David Hume, Inquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals , ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 160.

44. See Burnyeat, Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism? and Bredo Johnsen, On the Coherenceof Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Philosophical Review 110 (2001): 521561.

45. Frede, Sceptics Two Kinds of Assent; Gisela Striker, Historical Reflections on ClassicalPyrrhonism and Neo-Pyrrhonism, in Sinnott-Armstrong, Pyrrhonian Skepticism , 17.

46. I wish to thank Robert Audi, Mario De Caro, John Greco, Raul Hakli, Timo Kajamies, Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila, Kirk Ludwig, Marie McGinn, Alan Millar, Sami Pihlstrm, DuncanPritchard, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ernest Sosa, Emidio Spinelli, Leopold Stubenberg, andTimothy Williamson for helpful comments or discussion, as well as audiences at the University of Helsinki, the University of Rome La Sapienza, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Tartu, and the University of Stirling.

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